


Underpainting

by regalmilk



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 14:35:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20391292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regalmilk/pseuds/regalmilk
Summary: He’s not wearing any makeup. The greasepaint is absent, and his hair falls soft and flaxen, undyed. His scars are naked. This is not a sometimes. This is a never, and Bruce doesn’t know what it means.





	Underpainting

**Author's Note:**

> Set after The Dark Knight Rises

He has a dream that night. He is bent beneath the sterile light of the applied sciences division at Wayne Enterprises. Half the floor is gone, the entire story crumbling into the sewers that Bane once claimed as a hideout. What remains of the floor is lined with wooden pews. Like a church. He is kneeling in one of them, his head bowed over his clasped hands.

His crushed surveillance system serves as an altar, and though its hundreds of panels are cracked through, sonar images of the Joker’s face flicker upon every screen. In these images, he is dead.

A man standing before the system holds his arms out in a mimicry of salvation. He is wearing a water-stained leather jacket, and his face is distorted, like Bruce is looking at it through fogged-over glass. The man holds a porcelain owl mask in his hand. It is cracked, like the panels, and bloody bits of hair stick to its edges.

Bruce feels something wet and warm trickle down his forehead. His face stings. Burns. He understands. The owl mask is his. Ripped away from his skin. He clasps his hands tighter, trying to remember a prayer he doesn’t know.

“This is no mask,” the man at the altar says. “This is your real face. Beneath the cowl, and the flesh, and the bone. This is who you really are. A multibillion-dollar husk. A corpse posing as an idol.”

Bruce’s face is sheeting blood now. The muscle tissue there is raw and throbbing. He can barely see. He thinks he might be crying. He can hear his pulse.

“Did you ever imagine God would be _so ugly_?” The man shatters the mask in his fist.

Bruce’s skull shatters with it. And a wild screeching, thousands of bats, is torn from him.

—

When he wakes, he feels as though he hasn’t been dreaming. Rather that he was lost in thought and is only now aware of reality around him. He has been awake for four days and the concept of being asleep is nearly unknown to him.

Reality is dark, and the glow of Midtown beyond the penthouse is ghostly and subdued. He can barely make out the river by the splinters of light across its surface.

He takes a swath of pills and tablets now that his body both gratefully and begrudgingly accepts. Dexedrine for his increasingly frequent narcolepsy (this is what has afforded him four days of sleeplessness) and various brands of hydrocodone for everything else.

After the reactor’s detonation, and even after several rounds of internal decontamination, the doctors told him he should be dead. So he takes potassium iodide and some kind of intravenous solution for that too.

As he stumbles from the kitchen back to his bedroom, he sees a silhouette pressed starkly against the windows overlooking the river.

This should be a dream, but it is not. And its familiarity, the normalcy of it that he has quietly allowed into his life, still manages to wrack him with shame.

He rubs his temples deeply, runs a hand through his hair and wordlessly moves into the living room, turning on the dimmed studio lights and sitting on a forty thousand dollar satin sofa that he has never liked. There isn’t much in the penthouse that he does like, and the shame only multiplies when he realizes that some part of him dislikes the silhouette slightly less.

Sometimes, he and the Joker play cards. They don’t ever play for money, but they do play for Bruce’s pills. The first time they do this, Bruce notices many of the cards are burned through at the edges, or spattered with dried blood, or marked up in the margins with cryptic notes and strings of numbers. Some of the face cards have their faces scratched off. The first time, he doesn’t say anything. The next four times, he still doesn’t.

Sometimes, the Joker wears a service uniform and sucks him off. He knows that’s the joke: _service_ uniform. He still can’t decide if he finds it funny. In the white hot moments he never lingers on, Bruce’s one very sharp and obscene thought is that the Joker’s mouth both looks and feels like the inside of a blood orange.

Now the silhouette removes itself from the windows and becomes a real thing, tangible, and sits across from Bruce in a twelve thousand dollar armchair that matches the sofa.

He is not wearing his service uniform. But Bruce’s throat tightens in on itself and his swallow is so thick he can almost feel it choking him. He’s not wearing any makeup. The greasepaint is absent, and his hair falls soft and flaxen, undyed. His scars are naked. This is not a sometimes. This is a never, and Bruce doesn’t know what it means. He is filled with guilt, the requisite shame, and a blush of dread that rises from his knuckles into his face when he asks, “What do you think of that chair?”

“What do _I_ ? What do I, what do I…” He trails off, his throat like cracked velvet around the words. Bruce almost shudders.

“Personally, I’ve never liked it.” Bruce affects a tone like he’s having a session with an interior decorator, and he can feel the blood throbbing in his head.

“You don’t say.” The Joker eyes him darkly and they sit like that for far too long, before the man shifts, suddenly pensive, licks his upper lip and bounces in the chair a bit as if he’s actually evaluating it. “I think…”

And Bruce finds himself leaning in, the throbbing in his head magnified, as if the answer will provide him with some kind of lifeline. If a bomb went off just then, somewhere in the city, he would not move until he had heard the completion of this one thought.

“I think I’ll come back later, when you’re not being so _boring_.”

Bruce grabs his wrist, though the Joker makes no move at all to leave, and they both stare down at his clenched hand.

“_I really think_,” the Joker pauses to laugh, “that we should start putting those radiation pills of yours into the betting rotation.”

“Maybe we will if you stop marking your deck.” Bruce understands now, why he isn’t wearing makeup. But the implication of the Joker being _afraid_ of something is too monumental for the Wayne heir to even begin to process.

“Aren’t you the world’s _greatest detective_?” He’s still staring down at Bruce’s hand. “Unless I’m, ah, breaking your fingers, you shouldn’t need a handicap.”

“Fair enough.” The effects of the Dexedrine he’d taken six hours ago are already beginning to subside, and he feels himself go light, just on the precipice of drowsy. Bruce lets go of the Joker’s wrist. But his hand lingers near gloved fingertips, and from the depths of a madness he cannot contend with, he guarantees himself a mistake he knows he will make: “The chair’s not as nice as the sofa.”

Bruce invites this, and yet, a span of a few seconds is utterly lost from his memory, and then the Joker’s thighs are framing his hips, and the man’s weight and heat are spreading over Bruce’s lap. Bruce, for his traitorous part, is raking his fingers through foreign blond hair, and nipping gently at the scars of a Glasgow smile. The Joker smells like river water. Bleach. Blood. Bruce feels the cool leather of a glove against his throat, and he starts whispering, “But Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. _Rachel_.”

And the Joker pulls back roughly, simultaneously rolls his hips into Bruce’s crotch, and Bruce whimpers on the end of her name. The Joker rolls his eyes deliberately, because they’ve done this before, this particular therapy session.

“That’s nice,” the Joker says, removing Bruce’s hands from his hair and holding them in his own. “But, ah, tonight’s kind of about me. And I _really_ thought you’d have the decency to appreciate that.”

“Oh?” Bruce finds an edge, right under his own skin, in his nerve endings, and he smiles silkily. “You thought _I’d_ have decency?”

The Joker’s still holding his hands, but his grip weakens, and he huffs softly, looks over Bruce’s shoulder into some middle distance. He sighs. It is almost sad. It is terrifyingly _human_.

Bruce says Rachel’s name in his mind over and over again, until it loses its meaning. Until it starts to sound like the clicking of a car’s turn signal. He shifts and brings his hands back to the Joker’s hair and pulls him down.

“This is different,” Bruce tells him. The Joker’s face is different. He is not chaos now. Or perhaps he is simply chaos contained. Their mouths are inches apart.

“_I know_.”

Bruce can hear the owl mask splintering as he kisses him. Bites again at his scars. Runs his tongue underneath them from the inside of a blood orange mouth. They are both too rough and their teeth clash painfully. Bruce bites him everywhere. Tears into his paleness, makes him bleed. Feels up every inch of skin he can touch beneath his shirt. _Decency_. The Joker removes his gloves and caresses Bruce’s neck, his chest, presses his fingers into the gap between Bruce’s ribs where Talia had stabbed him. Bruce growls. The Joker giggles.

Bruce shoves him lengthwise against the sofa, on his back. Bruce’s mouth is still planted in his collarbone, but his hands go for the other’s belt and he nearly has it off when the Joker stops him.

“Are you… uh?”

It is one of his least eloquent sentences. But it is also the first time Bruce has ever reciprocated.

“I am, uh.” He teases. “You’re not wearing your uniform, so I figured it was my turn on the service desk.”

“You know that was just a—”

“A joke?” Bruce interrupts, palming him through his pants. There is a gasp and an intake of quiet babbling that he doesn’t wait to hear the end of, and he finally does away with the belt. And all the fabric beneath it.

Bruce looks up at the Joker beneath thick eyelashes, breathes on his cock. The surveillance panels start cracking again in his head. The breath earns a twitch, but the words draw out a deep blush, a visible ache, the cadence of each like the stroke of a fingertip: “You don’t own a leather jacket, do you?”

Bruce doesn’t wait for an answer. He wraps his tongue around the head, tasting the bud of precome as he does, and takes him in deep. He remembers the chanting of the men in the Pit as he climbed it, and this is the rhythm, the thrum he sets his pace to.

Bruce wants to touch the Joker’s hair. He can’t reach. He feels the other man’s grip in his own. He ghosts the shaft with his teeth. The Joker keens. He hollows out his cheeks, forces the tidal wave of the Joker’s hips to keep from choking him.

_Did you ever imagine God would be so ugly?_

The Joker drags Bruce’s head back. Looks down at him. Bruce meets his unpainted gaze, dark and lost, vibrant in the absence of the voids of black makeup. His face is damp, fevered. Even without the lipstick, his mouth is still red. Bruce’s eyes are wet.

When the Joker reaches his peak, his frenzy, Bruce thinks he hears his own name. He isn’t sure. They aren’t quite on a first name basis. He swallows. Right before he does, he feels the faintest brush of fingers against his cheek.

Bruce draws back slowly, rises over the other man on trembling arms.

The Joker, if he really is still the Joker without the mask, looks up at him. His paintless mouth quivers. There are more words there than the one he says, but Bruce will never hear them. “No.”

Bruce pants above him, wipes his mouth. He can still taste him. More salt than blood orange. “What?”

“I don’t…” The Joker reaches up to brush back strands of Bruce’s hair. “…own a leather jacket.”

—

Later, while he suffers through his Dexedrine withdrawal, smashing everything in his penthouse and trying to pick up smoking, Bruce will convince himself that this night had been a dream. Nothing more than a bizarre continuation to the surveillance altar and the man with the owl mask.

Later, Blake will visit him, an absolutely dour look on his face when he sees the shell Bruce has gradually become. He will say, ‘I’m taking you back to the manor, old man. With or without a fight—it’s your call.’ So of course, there will be a fight. Bruce will get in a few careless punches, but Blake will land the ones that count. He will let his protégé drag him back to the Palisades.

Later, he will be wearing the suit, and he’ll catch the Joker killing a cop in a vacated construction site. Bludgeoning him to death with his own nightstick. Bruce will break several of his ribs and slam him into the ground, and they will both feel the shift, the heat in this action that was never quite present before. The Joker will gibber and howl with laughter. Bruce will feel the requisite shame and use it to inspire his rage. He will hear again in his mind the question of the man in the leather jacket.

_Did you ever imagine God would be so ugly?_

Once, just once, Bruce thought he was beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always loved and appreciated.
> 
> tumblr: @ [regalmilk](https://regalmilk.tumblr.com)


End file.
